Modern day milking parlors are equipped to easily handle milking herds numbering in the thousands. Some of these parlors are equipped to conduct continuous milking operations, often milking each cow up to three times a day. It is of paramount importance that a dairy milking operation undertakes proper sanitization throughout the entire milking cycle for each cow including before milking (pre-treatment) and after milking (post-treatment) to insure optimum and safe milk production. Failure to implement proper and meticulous milking care can have costly repercussions upon the entire milking operation and over-all health of the milking herd. On occasions, an entire milk tank load of what would normally pass as grade A milk will be rejected because of a high bacterial count or other milk contaminates. This becomes costly for the milk producer.
A major contributing source of infectious milk contamination and dairy herd infections resides in the particular precautions which the milk producer undertakes to prevent these problems from arising. Unfortunately under current practices, the on-site milking operator primarily determines whether or not these precautions have been properly implemented. Accordingly, the precautions undertaken by the milking operator at the milking station or sites has a direct bearing on whether or not unhealthful milk contamination arises or herd bacterial infection spreads amongst the dairy herd. How and what safeguards the milking operator actually undertakes at the pre-milking treatment and the post milking treatment sites constitutes the essential safeguard in preventing infectious bacteria from contaminating the milk and the herd. Unattended precautions are often hidden or obscured from a milking manager awareness and therefore cannot be identified or timely rectified. Under current operations there exists no recorded data which tracks the milking record of a particular milking cow and the precise conditions under which the cow was prepared for milking, milked and post treated. There also does not exist a hand-held applicator which allows the herdsman or manager to actually control the precise procedure for the conduct of a desired treatment at the milking site. Having this information available and the means to implement treatment changes by the herdsman is indispensable to the optimization of milk production. In essence, the current systems leave the manager overseer at the mercy of the milking operator to conduct the proper milking treatment. These difficulties arise primarily because the milking manager cannot operationally monitor and regulate the precise treatment conducted at each milking site.
The prior art discloses many different types of hand-held teat cleaning devices (often referred to as an applicator) and systems associated therewith. Exemplary teat cleaning applicator disclosures include U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,937 to Farina et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 6,325,021 B1 to Farina. The Farina patent publication discloses a cleaning cup having a top side teat entryway and a pair of vertically positioned roller brushes rotating in opposite directions towards the teat which upon trigger switching dispenses a cleaning solution into the cleaning cup for cleansing with brushing. The Farina et al. patent similarly discloses a cleaning cup with a conventional top side teat entryway for reportedly washing, disinfecting, drying, and simulating teat milking. The Farina et al. cup relies upon a pair of oppositely rotating brushes rotationally positioned so as to pull the teat downward into a spinning cylindrical brush to clean the teat.
Another patent application publication 2007/0175405 A1 to Vecchia discloses a hand-held washing cup applicator having two counter rotating brushes and a single lower brush centered between the two upper brushes. A switch in the handle manually triggers the rotating brush and wash solution admitted to the cup. Washing of a cow teat involves vertically inserting the teat at the top side entryway. Teat cleaning is accomplished in a traditional manner by moving the cup upwardly and downwardly until teat cleaning is completed. This device may be reportedly used for pre-milking teat cleaning and sanitizing by manually triggering the applicator.
Patent application publication No. 2012-0067288 A1 Dole et al. discloses a device for cleaning teats of milk-producing animals housed in a parlor were in the teats are cleaned or disinfected prior to the milking operation. The system includes an external aqueous chlorine dioxide disinfectant solution source conducted for triggering by a hand-held applicator equipped with one or more scrubbing elements positioned for engaging a teat of the milk-producing animal. The hand-held applicator is remotely connected to a tank holding disinfecting solution. The hand-held applicator traditionally relies upon a vertical teat feed and cleaning of the milk-producing animal teats.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,321,688 to Ericksson also discloses a conventional vertical entryway teat cleaning device equipped with a pair of counter rotating brushes which orbit about the teat to effectuate cleaning. Other publication depicting prior hand-held devices, applicators or systems include No. 99/04623 to Farina and European publication No. 1,030,549 to Birk.
The prior art is essentially devoid of a programmed master control center (e.g. personal logic controller often identified as PLC) which actually monitors and controls the precise processing conditions conducted by an operator at a milking site. Even more remote from the current state of the art is PLC monitoring and controlling site which may be operated at any remote site from the actual milking site to effectuate changes in the precise type of treatment administered at the milking site.
As evidenced by the aforementioned, the milking parlor sanitation problems have failed to be alleviated by the manner whereby the treatments have been traditionally conducted. The milking operation becomes repetitively tedious and monotonous even to the most experienced on-site milking operator which in turn often leads to inattention and dereliction of milking duties. Conventional hand-held teat applicators are equipped with a top side teat entryway, the use of which also necessitates repetitive wrist twisting, coupled with repetitive upward and downward movements which can readily lead to fatigue of the operator's arms and wrists, and often cause serious cases of tendonitis. The milking overseers or herdsman problems become compounded because certain operator may simply be lazy or wishes to cut corners on the prescribed procedural steps essential for the effective bovine teat and bag treatments. Unfortunately, there exists no means for the milking herd owner, herdsman, manger or overseer to monitor and actually control the precise treatment to be administered to each cow at the milking site.
The problems associated with the current use of hand-held pre- and post-treatment applicators primarily arises because the on-site parlor operator manually triggers the prescribed treatment protocol from beginning to end. This places a complete reliance upon each on-site milking operator to appropriately conduct each treatment for each cow under the precise optimum treatment conditions. In essence, this leaves the managing herdsman at the mercy of each individual operator at the milking treatment site. There accordingly exists a need for a hand-held bovine treatment applicator in which the operator merely triggers the applicator whereupon the triggered applicator, rather than the operator, prescribes the teat treatment conditions. The ability to regulate, monitor and control the precise conduct of the sanitizing solutions (including temperature, ejection periods, pressures, concentrations, brushing times, brush type, brush rotational speeds, etc.), the operational use of the rotating brushes in the cleansing, sanitizing, and drying of the teats by the brushes (including pre-milking stimulation, teat pre-milking, sanitization scrubbing times, drying intervals, post-milking treatments such iodine dipping etc.) by the head herdsman are particularly important factors which remain unregulated by current usage and design of all current hand-held applicators, all of which prior art defects are corrected by the embodiments of the present invention.
The prior art has heretofore failed to provide a combination of rotating teat cleansing bristled rollers confined within a hand-held applicators capable of effectively cleaning and sanitizing bovine teats in a horizontally positioned pass therethrough. All of the existing commercial systems rely upon a top sided teat entryway within a boxed-like case typically equipped with rotating polyolefin bristled brushes positioned below the teat top entryway within a cupped receptacle. These prior hand-held applicators also rely upon a downward and upward motion (as opposed to horizontal movement) using roller brushes rotating at a constant rotational speed. There currently exists no hand-held teat treatment applicator capable of any mode of operation other than placing the bovine teat onto a top open-faced canister type applicator necessitating a wrist twisting, up and down motion by the operator. The applicators currently in use do not permit an operator to change brush types during the milking operation. There also does not exist a bristled rotating roller brush system capable of horizontally receiving a bovine teat and channeling the teat to an optimum centrally disposed treatment section while maintaining the teat in an optimum sanitation and cleansing position. The present invention affords such advantages and many others over the prior art hand-held applicators.
The prior art hand-held bovine teat cleaning devices are further plagued with a host of other problems which have seriously hampered their effective adaptation by modern day milking operations. The drive gear mechanism of these conventional units rely upon a gear system which provides no effective means for protecting the gears from external contamination or gear stripping. This leads to premature gear damage, costly repair and milking interruptions due to applicator down time. There exists a need to correct these defects. Moreover, the frequent need for brush and gear replacement typically entails costly and time consuming manual labor to simply replace the damaged or worn out brushes or gears. These conventional hand-held applicators necessitate in essence a complete disassembly of the gear and chassis system to simply replace the worn out brushes. Since the need for gear and brush replacements is frequent and sometimes unexpected, an orderly milking operation can be placed in complete disarray when an applicator brush needs replacement. The unique embodiments of applicant's hand-held applicator include roller brush shafts equipped with self-locking shaft tips mating onto a locking power drive source which allows for an expeditious replacement of worn or ineffective roller brushes.
Other features affording distinctive advantages over the current ineffective hand-held applicators include annular seals in juxtaposition to the roller shaft, snap on or a quick-lock which insures proper brush and shaft alignment to the power drive source and seals the gear system against damaging external contamination. A further unique applicator feature provided by this invention includes brush rollers which may be rotated at any desired preset rotational speed as opposed to current devices which operate only at a constant RPM. This feature is particularly useful since different types of treatments often require different rotational speeds.
The typical hand-held applicators also often rely upon cylindrical roller equipped with tufts of polyolefin filaments (e.g. polypropylene) operationally positioned in an overlapping or intermeshing relationship ostensibly to compensate and aid in the teat cleansing procedure. These factors in combination with an inability to selective prescribe a wide range of variable rotational speeds to fit on-site conditions inherently create adverse environmental conditions ill-suited for effective hygienic bovine teat and bag treatment. The present hand-held applicator utilizes softer and more resilient brush tufts operationally rotated under prescribed and controlled rotational speeds to meet on-site conditions which significantly enhance the usefulness and hygienic efficacy of the teat treatments.